On Friday we launched
our amazing new commissioning competition ABOUT which offers women
writing in the East of England paid time to write and mentoring to create a
text for publication and performance. See our dedicated blog page - About comp - for more
details and information on how to enter.
Below are the profiles
of the judges and mentors for ABOUT and also the names of the project’s main
supporters, including Arts Council England which has awarded us a generous
grant. Thank you to all.
Our four mentors who
will judge entries for ABOUT and will help the winning writers to craft their
texts are Words And Women organisers Lynne Bryan and Belona Greenwood, theatre
director Adina Levay and performance poet Hannah Walker. Our special guest
judge is Professor Andrew Cowan, Director of Creative Writing at the University
of East Anglia. Lynne’s profile and Bel’s can be found on the ‘We are’ page of
this blog. Adina’s profile and Hannah’s and Andrew’s are here:
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Adina
Levay is one of
Hungary’s leading theatre directors. She was visiting director at three leading repertory companies: the
New Theatre, Budapest, the National Theatre in Miskolc in Hungary, and the
Jokai Theatre, in Komarno, Slovakia.
Since coming to the
UK, Adina founded and became the Producing Artistic Director of Chalk Circle, a
Norwich based small-scale theatre company set up in 2012 to create and produce
contemporary and innovative theatre.
For Chalk Circle she produced and directed Alice's Adventure, a new
piece of writing by Belona Greenwood and curated by the Norwich Writers' Centre
for the Norfolk and Norwich Festival, at the Playhouse. She also produced and
directed 4.48 Psychosis at and in partnership with The Garage in Norwich, as
well as We Lost Elijah, by Ryan Craig, a joint project with The Garage for the
National Theatre Connections Festival, and the Contemporary European Drama
Review.
Hannah Jane Walker is an award winning poet, scriptwriter and producer described by
What's On Stage as “quietly profound”. Her poems are full of sharp edges and
unexpected angles as well as warmth and empathy for fellow humans. With
collaborator Chris Thorpe she has made The Oh Fuck Moment, a “clever, strangely
poignant mix of poetry and performance” (The Guardian) and I Wish I Was Lonely,
“so cunningly and playfully constructed, that it feels like a gift” (The
Guardian). The shows are part performance, part poetry gig and part interactive
experience; they are about the difficult and uplifting moments we face in
the process of trying to be a person. Hannah has toured nationally and
internationally, had plays and poems published by Oberon Books, Penned in the
Margins and Nasty Little Press among others, she has written for The Guardian,
run workshops in widely unusual places such as trains and boats and produced
projects which put young people at the centre of their own learning and take
creative risks. She believes in being tough on your own writing. She loves
collaboration.
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| (c) Martin Figura |
Andrew Cowan is the Director of the Creative Writing programme at UEA. His first novel, Pig (1994), won a Betty Trask Award, the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, The Authors' Club First Novel Award, a Scottish Arts Council Book Award, the Ruth Hadden Memorial Award, and was shortlisted for five other literary awards. Common Ground (1996) and Crustaceans (2000) both received Arts Council bursaries. What I Know was the recipient of an Arts Council Writers' Award and was published in 2005. His creative writing guidebook, The Art of Writing Fiction, was published in 2011, and his fifth novel, Worthless Men, was published in 2013.
ABOUT is supported by Arts Council
England, The Forum Trust, Unthank Books, and Writers’ Centre Norwich
We are very proud and excited to announce that we have been awarded an Arts Council Grant For The Arts for our great commissioning project called ‘About’. Don’t miss out on your chance to be mentored by Words And Women, theatre director Adina Levay and performance poet Hannah Walker, and win one of four commissions worth £950 - £1,400.
This
is an excellent, intimate and inspiring book about the secret history of women
during World War 1. Women were
extraordinary, proved they could do it all, did it all, sometimes working 100
hours a week and for less pay than the men and with the knowledge they would go
back into the home when no longer required. Kate Adie exposes the attitudes of
the day and the way those attitudes were modified by the women. She also illustrates the battles that
women had to fight to be taken seriously, to be valued and to be given the
opportunity to be useful on the front line. This is an intimate book, Kate Adie
tells individual stories of remarkable women with personal insight. She reflects on her knowledge of
her own family and the way it was in Sunderland in those years. There are little known names of women
in here who should be celebrated.
It’s shameful that Flora Sandes, the only British woman to fight in WW1,
who attained the rank of captain, is taught about in Serbian schools but
unknown to British children. I
cannot recommend this book highly enough. Although it isn’t a light read, it is
vivid and compelling.
If
there is one book that captures the transformation of lives from quiet summer
certainty to the terrible, violent loss of loved ones, then this is it. Vera Brittain’s autobiographical
account of a lost generation, alive with detail, passionate and emotionally
searing. It was first published in
1933 and brought Brittain great popularity. It’s a big book but a fascinating insight into what it was
like to be an intelligent, courageous, capable young woman with academic
ambitions in a stifling pre-war world and the innocence of first love before
the war came along and wrenched her world apart. 
This
is such a human book. There are so
many different kinds of love expressed in letters written a century before in
the mud of the trenches. Whether
it is a letter from a prince to his wife, or a German soldier to his
sweetheart, a British volunteer to his mother, or a father to his children,
these are real glimpses into the hearts of people who had to endure the Great
War. The war turned men into poets
– there is so much eloquence as well as tenderness and passion in these
letters, but also cruelty, jealousy and disdain. Close to twenty thousand bags of mail crossed the channel
every day to reach the trenches at the front. These are a handful of the
letters that connected lost worlds. 
Pat Barker’s masterful trilogy was inspired by
her grandfather's experiences in the First World War. Regeneration, the first in the
trilogy, is set in the Craiglockhart War Hospital where soldiers were sent to
be "cured" of psychological trauma before being trundled back to the
front. The story focuses on William Rivers, the therapist whose role of
mind-mender in order to return these men to the horrors of the front, becomes
increasingly difficult, as he uncovers the traumas and truth of the war. In his care are the poets, Siegfried
Sasson and Wilfred Owen, as well as the fictional Billy Prior. The trilogy is full of questions about
the morality of the war, reflecting the issues and concerns of the Britain of
100 years ago. It explores the
conflict between duty and sympathy and exposes the questions that we must all
answer about conflict, duty, sanity and humanity. I could have read all three books, (Regeneration, The Eye In The
Door and The Ghost Road, the latter shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1995),
in one sitting, so compelling is the world, Barker incisively writes into
existence. 